I believe that social media, and the impact of digital crowds has often desensitised us from the initial meaning of having support. I was sitting in bed last night going through Tiktok and Instagram and I was genuinely just thinking to myself "dang, I wish I had more people that saw my music and supported me...".
Hold up. I have currently 1,364 followers on Instagram - that is a CRAZY amount of people. I would get overwhelmed if that many people swarmed me in person. It has been so normalised through reels and tiktoks that hundreds of thousands of views is normal. That getting anything below 1,000 should be shameful or just a bit embarrassing. Why have we become the race that wants so much more, and not look at what we have already in shock and awe!
And perhaps that is the anomaly of social media: we can be surrounded by more people than ever before, supporting, commenting, INTERACTING with us and our art, yet somehow feel increasingly alone. The problem is that our perception of support has been distorted due to the inflation of people on the internet!
I sincerely believe that comparison is the thief of joy. It steals all the self confidence I have built for my style, my genre, my soul, my art. I swear, if I had just stopped thinking to myself "you should be more like her, then you'll be liked more", I would be in a better place than I am in now. I need to stop comparing the numbers, the body, the person, the soul, because at the end of the day, we will never be anyone but ourselves, so lets cut to the chase and just do that... be OURSELVES!
The amount of love I have already gotten for my passions is crazy. One person leaving love, or reading my blog, or telling me "I watched all your short films! blah blah blah..." is so flattering to me, it makes me giggle and kick my feet in the air like a teenage girl!! It makes me feel seen (and heard if it's my music duh haha). And if 1,364 people stood in a room and told me they wanted to hear my music, I would probably be so utterly overwhelmed and shake in my boots till I shrunk to the size of an ant.
I don't want to lose that. Because a person is still a person. That is so special to me. Maybe the problem isn't that we don't have enough. Maybe we have really become desensitised to what “enough” looks like. Isn't that the tiniest bit scary to you???
I felt sick to my stomach when I caught myself wanting more. Greed is such an ugly thing to see, and I often try to refrain from feeling like it. If you know me in person, I try my best to saturate my life with happiness, to find the silver lining, to keep my head up out of the clouds!
I want to look at 1,364 people (or more in the future... now we're derailing, whoops!) and remember that every single one of them is an actual human being, with their own lives, their own thoughts, their own little worlds that I will probably never know anything about.
And somehow, all of those people have crossed paths with something I made. So, I think I am going to try and remember:
I'm thankful for one.
I'm grateful for all.
Contemplatively yours, Mei x
No comments:
Post a Comment